Reaching Through the Dark
Week 25: Art as window and mirror.
During the first weeks of Carolyn’s cancer treatment, I listened to the same Billie Eilish song on repeat:
I had a dream
I got everything I wanted
Not what you’d think
and if I’m being honest
it might have been a nightmare.
In the months leading up to Carolyn’s diagnosis, I’d only just gotten our life together. We’d moved out of my mother’s basement and into our own small apartment in the center of town. I’d graduated with my MFA, gotten a job that paid enough to get us off food stamps, and we had health insurance. Even as the pandemic took hold of the world, I felt optimistic about our little family unit. I could feel my life becoming something else- something good, something I wanted. It felt like, after years of struggling to move ahead, our hardest times were finally behind us.
In mid-May 2020, I sent a text to a friend in response to their text checking in: despite the e-schooling and working-from-home-with-small-kids challenges, it feels good to know at least we have each other, we have a home we love and we’re together in it. So that’s something, in these turbulent times!
Two weeks later we had an oncology team and Carolyn was hospitalized for her first stretch of chemotherapy. I traced a line down the map of her treatment- years of her life, I thought, years we’ll spend trying to keep her alive. It felt like a whole world dropped into my hands- I couldn’t hold the enormity of it.
Hours after a doctor in the local ER told me she’d be sending us down to the oncology team in the city- immediately, she said, immediately- I stood alone at the window in our new hospital room and looked out at the Philly skyline. The white glow of flash-bangs were going off in the distance as protesters and police converged- cancer had swooped down and carried us into its depths, but outside the world was warring. The monitors and machines glowed and beeped softly as my daughter slept in the bed behind me, feverish with an illness that was electrifying in its terror. I felt the room melt around me, the lights of the monitors bleeding into the dark, and thought: we’re in a nightmare.
When I saw a few weeks ago that Suleika Jaouad and Anne Francey would be exhibiting their paintings together at ArtYard, a gallery in a town just up the river from us, I sent the information to Carolyn. Do you want to go to the opening? I asked.
She read through the exhibition information and looked at photos of the paintings, her eyes huge, almost hungry.
Mom, she said, we have to go.
The Alchemy of Blood includes paintings Anne Francey made while pregnant with Suleika and “shields” she created later, as a way to protect Suleika during her illness. Her work is shown alongside Suleika’s renditions of fever dreams painted from her hospital bed during her leukemia treatment. It’s an astounding exhibition, but I wasn’t sure what it would be like to come face-to-face with it.
At the opening, I trailed Carolyn through the gallery like an enormous shadow as she moved from painting to painting. She considered each one, her face so close I almost tugged her back a few times, then leaned away to take a photo before moving on.
I dreamed of animals too, she said, pointing to a painting of a bird with a mermaid clasped in its beak. I dreamed of monkeys swinging from my medication pole. Sometimes I saw them when I couldn’t see anything else.
I remembered her vision loss, how sometimes I’d have to carry her around because her medications blurred and distorted the world until she was afraid to move through it alone. I remembered, too, the terrors that brought her out of her thin sleep, how she woke confused and terrified, reaching for me.
They’re from her nightmares, she said, looking at a painting of an elephant reared on its hind legs, an infusion bag looped over its tusks leading to the port site of a figure in a hospital gown.
I wondered how much of what she was seeing was new to her and how much she recognized. As she moved amongst those fever-dream paintings, I realized she carries a world inside herself that I can only bear witness to. Hers is an understanding that lies just beyond my grasp.
It’s no news that art helps us process what we struggle to express. During my most turbulent times, I’ve spent hours sitting in the Impressionism wing of the Philly Art Museum. I’ve spent days under a blanket reading through hundreds of pages of my favorite books. I’ve sought comfort in other peoples’ stories as a way to understand and make peace with my own. Art gives us refuge, and it changes the way we see the world and ourselves.
In the time since Carolyn’s illness, I’ve struggled with my right to my pain. Carolyn bore the brunt of the suffering during her cancer and I often feel the need to atone for my own, as if I don’t have a right to it because cancer didn’t happen to me. In the hospital I was only ever ‘Mom,’ never referred to by my name, and so I often felt reduced to my function as ‘mother.’
Standing in front of Anne Francey’s “shields,” I considered how cancer had happened to us all. I saw her love for her sick daughter in the shine and color of the painted clay, and I saw in each twist of fiber the desire to protect.
I did not know how to protect Carolyn when she was sick. I wished we could trade places- make it me, I thought when the fevers hit and she shivered and cried into my side. Let us switch places, make it me.
Turning my aching heart into art felt out of reach. I could barely feed myself, let alone type or lift a brush, so it was astounding to see that creation through grief, creation through terror, creation in response to and as a way through cancer is possible.
At the end of the night, I lingered in front of one of Francey’s enormous flower paintings and let myself get lost in its scale, its color, the dark lines showing through the paint. Like veins, I thought. Like blood.
When Carolyn was sick, the enormity of her illness felt like it would overtake us. I often thought it was the only thing larger than my maternity. The flowers painted on the wall-sized canvases seemed to reflect the scale of motherhood, but also of illness.
I cannot think of blood without thinking of leukemia, and to think of leukemia is to consider my child’s mortality. What once served as a link to my daughter’s life has become a terrifying suggestion of her death. In this way, blood has become more than the dark fluid pumping through my heart.
The flower seemed to swell, its outline fuzzing. Everything around me muted as if I were underwater, and my heart hammered its way into my throat. I tried to pull air into my lungs, but the budding panic attack sat on my chest like an elephant. As the feeling of being swallowed whole crawled over me and darkened the edges of my vision, I felt a warm, slender hand slip into my own.
Mom, Carolyn said, tugging my arm. The room came back to me in a rush- hundreds of simultaneous conversations, sweat sticking hair to the back of my neck. Her voice cut through the buzz and chatter. Mom, we can go now. She squeezed my hand.
As she led me through the outer tendrils of the crowd, I felt something shift. We’d peered through a window into one other’s experience, but also into a mirror for our own. Carolyn squeezed my hand again. I felt her proximity, how she’d once grown in me and emerged, a leanbh, no longer of my body but from it- how we found each other in the dark, our blood alchemized into something new.
Wow! That's amazing you all were able to attend Suleika and Anne's art show. I feel like that would be pretty impactful for anyone, but especially for you and Carolyn. it's beautiful. Thank you for sharing.